
The Minister of Information, Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah, has called for an honest and open discussion on the low contribution made to the National Health Insurance Scheme relative to the cost of healthcare delivery in the country.
“In Ghana we have two or three issues with health insurance fund. The first challenge is that the premiums that we are paying…we are playing ostrich with it. We are paying GH¢8.00 per annum for people who are on SSNIT as premium for health insurance and for people who are not on SSNIT paying GH¢28.00.
We should all ask ourselves whether GH¢8.00 or GH¢28.00 can adequately fund what is supposed to be a pool of risk to the extent that it can even fund the cost of dialysis,” he said.
Mr Nkrumah made the call when the leadership of the Private Health Facilities Association of Ghana (PHFAG) called on him at his office in Accra yesterday.
The visit was to discuss with the Minister some of the challenges making dialysis treatment in the country inaccessible and expensive.
It was also to table some solutions that could be adopted to address the challenges for the Minister to inform cabinet about it.
Mr Nkrumah said the other issue was that as a country, we collect a levy ostensibly for the health insurance, however, these levies are not transferred as they should for their intended purposes.
“From the days of President Kufuor who introduced this health insurance on national basis for this country… even since the days of President Kufuor, we have not been able to transfer the whole 100 per cent of what is raised into the National Health Insurance Fund. I think from President Kufour’s time it was 70 per cent there about and now if you look at the data, it about 50 per cent,” he said.
The situation he emphasised was troubling to most of the health providers, adding that “There is a question about how we are transferring all the monies we are collecting as levies into the health insurance fund and even when we are transferring, what is the rate at which you are transferring it.”
He said collectively as a people, Ghanaians must find sustainable ways of delivering quality healthcare for ourselves as well as address some of the inherent challenges in the healthcare system.
He said health was a public service which ordinarily should have been the responsibility of government to provide quality and affordable healthcare that was accessible to the population everywhere.
“We know the financing constraints we have as a country so when private sector is supporting, it is only a compliment to what government should be doing, but health is a public service,”
He said in the area of equipment for dialysis and other related machines, it was important that the government took a critical look while collectively we explore ways by which we could make it easy and affordable for the private sector to bring in these dialysis equipment.
The Vice President of PHFAG, Dr Yaw Osafo, on his part said kidney cases in the country were becoming alarming yet the number of centres to treat it were very few.
He said the number of dialysis machines in the country were just about 51, with 55 per cent of these dialysis being in Accra while Kumasi has 17per cent with the remaining 32 per cent for the remaining 14 regions in the country.
Dr Osafo explained that setting up a dialysis system was really expensive with the machine alone costing about $15,000.
He said there was the need for the broader picture in terms of procurement of medical equipment to be looked at again, stressing that “These are live saving machines and it breaks my heart that people need to go out of this country to seek medical care not because we don’t have the human resource but because most of the time just because we don’t have the equipment.”
He said even though government was doing a lot in the area of healthcare, most often the attention is taken off the private sector and this would have to change.
Dr Osafo appealed to the Minister to lobby the government to give a waiver on taxes and duties on medical equipment brought into the country.
He said such a waiver would not only increase the number of dialysis centres in the country but would also reduce the cost of treatment by not less than 40 per cent.
BY CLIFF EKUFUL